Wait ends for N.L. residential school pupils
Trudeau apologizes for treatment of Innu students in school, saying it was ‘unacceptable’
Once frightened, lonely children who lost their culture and innocence rose in a standing ovation as the prime minister at last said it for all Canadians: It was wrong, and we are sorry.
“I humbly stand before you to offer a long-overdue apology,” Justin Trudeau said Friday through tears. “To all of you, we are sorry.”
Many of the 300 people gathered for the ceremony in Goose Bay bowed their heads and cried. Others tried to comfort those who sobbed openly.
Trudeau offered the apology for beatings, sexual abuse, neglect and loss of Innu and Inuit language and culture at five residential schools in the province. The International Grenfell Association ran three of the schools, while the Germanybased Moravian missionaries ran the other two.
Trudeau said parents were promised their children would be cared for and would be safe. Instead, kids as young as five were isolated from their families and stripped of their identity. They were made to feel “irrelevant and inferior” and taught to be “ashamed of who they were and where they were from.”
“The kind of thinking that led to the establishment of the residential school system and left deep scars for so many has no place in our society,” Trudeau said. “It was unacceptable then and it is unacceptable now.”
The former students were left out of a compensation package and national apology in 2008 by former prime minister Stephen Harper. His Conservative government argued that Ottawa didn’t oversee those schools, but the Liberal government offered last year to settle a class-action lawsuit for $50 million.
Toby Obed accepted the prime minister’s apology on behalf of former students. Approaching the stage, his arms raised in triumph, Obed yelled: “We got it!”
“Because I come from a patient and forgiving culture I think it is proper for us to accept an apology from the Government of Canada,” he said.
Obed led the almost decade-long legal fight for recognition. He was among 29 former students who were the only ones in Canada forced to testify in open court about what happened to them.
Not everyone was ready to accept the gesture. Innu Nation leaders boycotted the event.
“I’m not satisfied that Canada understands yet what it has done to Innu and what it is still doing,” Grand Chief Gregory Rich said in a statement late Thursday.